Hinds: Soulmates and Superstars

At Paste’s East Austin Block Party this past March, Hinds took the main stage to kick off our third and final day of music. It was a noon start time, still early for most festival-goers who would be lingering from event to event throughout the day. You can never bank on a crowd filling out at the beginning of everything during South By Southwest week, especially when the previous night’s capers are still reverberating into the dawn. All I could predict was it would be a broiling afternoon and that, as the clock ticked upward to 12, it was like Hinds had summoned all of Central Texas to High Noon. It was easily the biggest crowd of the week, as folks spilled into E Cesar Chavez Street and folded up onto the pavement of the neighboring Coral Snake.

Watching Carlotta Cosials and Ana Perrote play the classics (“Just Like Kids (Miau),” “New For You”) and some fresh joints (“Coffee”) was so rapturous that it felt like they were from Texas. Their performance of their brand new, Daniel Johnston-referencing tune “Hi, How Are You” certainly didn’t hurt the cause. But of course, Hinds are firmly from Madrid; it’s their fandom that spans so many global meccas that you need more than two hands to count just how many countries love them. It’s why more than a hundred folks came out to see Hinds play a quick set in the stew of an Austin swelter, and it’s the purest example of why Cosials and Perrote decided to name their fourth album VIVA HINDS.

Within the first minutes of the record, Cosials and Perrote check in with each other, trading affirmative verses with one another before coming together to ask the necessary questions: “Hey, you O.K.?” “I’ve been better, to be honest.” “Why do you care?” “Are you waiting for the same bus once again?” “Are you wearing the same tee you wore just yesterday?” It capsizes inside a plainspoken cry, of Hinds chanting “lemme shine, shine, shine” to the high-heavens, while distorted guitar ephemera rains down onto them. Cosials and Perrote wrote “Hi, How Are You” not knowing that it would be the first song on the final tracklist, but it felt like a crucial turning point in their artistry—a first stroke of Hinds refusing to cater to any template, of them embracing their sound without industry or systematic influence. “The structure that we spent eight years working on and building disappeared and vanished around us,” Perrote says. “We did this album not knowing much, and that led us to a place of more freedom. This is the first album where we’re not trying to sound like the radio. We already know we’re not going to make it to the radio, even when we try making it to the radio. We tried that, let’s add to it with what we have.”

That structure Perrote speaks of is the existence of the band itself. It began in 2011, with Cosials and Perrote operating as a duo called Deers before a threat of legal action forced them to change course and call themselves Hinds. Fast-forward to 2014, and they were joined by bassist Ade Martín and drummer Amber Grimbergen. From 2016 up through the summer of 2020, Hinds enjoyed a great clip of records, releasing Leave Me Alone, I Don’t Run and The Prettiest Curse one after the other and even nabbing a Best of What’s Next designation. Less than two years later, Martín and Grimbergen left the band and they were no longer signed to Mom+Pop Records, leaving Cosials and Perrote devastated and without a label. The future of Hinds had never been so up in the air.

Martín and Grimbergen departed Hinds in December 2022, just as Cosials and Perrote were ready to start demoing songs that would become VIVA HINDS. “We had a whole fucking speech ready,” Perrote says. “‘Tell me what albums you’ve been listening to, let’s do a big mood board. Where are we gonna go?’ We had the songs, but we didn’t know, musically and production-wise, where we wanted the album to go. We wanted to decide that between all of us. And in that meeting, they told us, ‘Actually, we’re quitting.’ We really didn’t see it coming.” The very alchemy of Hinds was about to drastically change, but Martín and Grimbergen’s departure provided Cosials and Perrote with a silver lining. “We had something that we felt was already very powerful to help us fight through the darkness and the questions of ‘Is this gonna work?’ ‘What’s gonna happen?’” Perrote continues. “Walking through the unknown with some songs is a completely different thing than walking through it without songs.”

Though the band wrote on Instagram that “music has the power to heal an aching soul” and that they had “been through something very hurtful, but we’re gonna carry on,” and all of that was true. “It wasn’t a beautiful goodbye,” Cosials says, solemnly. “It was kind of cold to us.” That same night, she and Perrote hung back at the North Madrid bar Hinds had just split in half at, “crying their eyes out.” “We had a beer together and we talked so, so much about what the fuck just happened,” Cosials continues. “But we both knew. If any of us had doubts, it [only lasted] seconds. We looked at each other and it was like, ‘If you’re in, I’m in.’” Perrote is honest about how crucial the timing of everything was, that if she and Cosials had not started to come up with new material and were feeling excited about LP4, Hinds may have not withstood the fracture. “For a while, we didn’t feel ready to make an album, because it takes a lot of you to, especially right now, put an album out,” she says. “We felt like [The Prettiest Curse], because it came out during the pandemic, we weren’t ready to move on from it. It was actually perfect timing, knowing that we were in the zone already. We knew we had something special. We knew we weren’t done.”

Cosials says that she and Perrote never listen to their own music unless it’s unreleased, but all of that changed when they couldn’t announce their bandmates’ departures. “No one knew, and we didn’t know what was going to happen with Hinds,” she mentions. “‘Are people gonna accept this change? Are people gonna somehow get mad at someone?’ You never know what’s going to happen, and I remember the songs were giving me the fucking power. I trusted in the songs so, so, so much.” Hinds considers their past to have been colored by a bit of bad luck, though they believe they’re far away from it now. “You really can’t force people to choose their lives at all,” Cosials says. “People just want to settle down. Label, management, money, being broke for such a fucking long way—half of those things broke us completely, like really made us very depressed. We struggled a lot with music. I was angry at the third album for such a long time for not being able to play it.”

So what shifted for her and Perrote? “We realized, ‘Let’s stop pretending. Let’s just try to be ourselves and see what we have,’” Cosial admits. Hinds didn’t have a producer, a label or a backing band. All they had were three songs and a one-way ticket upwards. “The girls leaving, we knew that it wasn’t going to destroy us. It was going to hurt us. It actually hurt us very bad. But it’s not gonna destroy Hinds. It’s gonna make us stronger,” Cosial concludes.

The decision to name LP4 VIVA HINDS came through 10 years of crowds and a known love shared between the band and its listeners. “The amazing power that music has is to unite people that don’t know each other from different countries, who don’t even speak the same language, and you still feel connected,” Perrote says. The “VIVA HINDS” chant rose from the ashes of Hinds changing their name from Deers, because audiences were screaming those two words at them during a critical metamorphosis for Cosials and Perrote. “It was giving us a lot of strength, and it has stuck so much with us and with all of our close people,” Perrote says. “It’s easy now to see that of course we had to keep going and of course everything was going to be great, because we’re good musicians and we have fans and blah, blah, blah. But, honestly, when you stop playing shows—when you stop releasing music and time keeps passing—it is hard to know. And knowing how volatile this industry is and how fucked up the world is, it was very hard to stay positive and to know if someone was going to be there waiting for it.”

While it may seem like, at least on the surface, the world never stopped loving Hinds, it’s easy to see how the affections Cosials and Perrote once leaned on felt increasingly thinner in those moments of pause. They couldn’t even post on social media a lot in-between The Prettiest Curse and the departure of their bandmates. It was in those undercurrents of ambiguity that “VIVA HINDS” stuck between them, their family and their friends—the people who would show up if it’s 7 PM and all you need is a beer and a hug. “If you’re having a bad day, they laugh about it with you,” Perrote says. “They would say, ‘Come on, Viva Hinds!’ They never stopped believing in us. Sometimes you want to be honest and tell your friends that, maybe, you should find another job—and that could’ve been good advice, but it wasn’t the case. Everyone, and it wasn’t that many people, would whisper ‘Viva Hinds’ to our ears and we would say it to each other and it transformed. Maybe in the beginning it was more of a joyful thing. Now, it feels so powerful. It summed up perfectly, ‘Come on, we can do this.’” VIVA HINDS feels like a debut album for Cosials and Perrote because they, as Perrote puts it, “died and had a full rebirth.” They carried on and, now, are celebrating their decision to not quit this racket.

VIVA HINDS is, musically, a return to Hinds’ roots, as it’s the first album Cosials and Perrote have ever made as a duo (though producer Pete Robertson does handle the drumming). For them, the building process became so unique and personal. You’re never going to hear another record that sounds like this one, because it is imbued with so much of Hinds’ technicalities and it bleeds from them. So much of Cosials and Perrote got deposited into its structure that it is beautifully irreplicable—concocted in a studio the duo built themselves across two homes in rural France, an idea that germinated during a snow day in England. Robertson suggested making the record in Spain, but Cosials and Perrote shot that idea down. “When you’re making an album, you don’t want to be thinking about calling your grandma or going for lunch with a friend or ‘Oh, my God, I need to pick up this parcel from UPS,’” Perrote mentions. “We wanted to conserve a bit of that romanticism and focus and create the bubble that we think we need to be in when you’re making an album. None of us wanted to record it in our own country.” So, Hinds filled a Mini Cooper and Cosials’ “mom van” with Perrote’s dog, their suitcases and their equipment and drove 12 hours north.

As Perrote puts it, VIVA HINDS is “not an album that is bragging technique.” Rather, it’s a holistic journey that metabolized the intimacy of the place it was written in into 10 bang-on tracks. They finished writing them in the autumn of 2022 and recorded the whole thing in the rising hours of the following summer. The elements involved were minimal, largely because Hinds don’t believe in needing 100 snares or 20 guitars to choose from. In fact, having to pick between more than two options for any type of gear is torture to them. “We’re people who get really attached to our little things and the guitars we’ve been writing with forever,” Perrote says. “We get one new thing and we get super pumped and excited about that new thing, and we use it fully. It was really nice to have that limitation and get deeper in the knowledge of the few little things we had. I don’t think [VIVA HINDS] sounds like it was done with limitation. I don’t hear the difference. I think we fully exploited everything that we had, and we could have done 10 more songs sounding fully different with the tiny few options that we had.” VIVA HINDS was like going back to square one; it was Cosials and Perrote against a guitar and a notebook.

It was a meeting with Beach Weather’s Sean Silverman in Los Angeles in 2022 that became a pivotal turning point in where Hinds was going on LP4—though, according to Perrote, it was an almost-horrible day that became “one of the most important days for the next two years.” They were in the city playing a few festivals, and their manager had set them up to collaborate with “a very big writer” whose name escapes both Cosials and Perrote when we speak with each other. “We’re very bad at remembering names,” Perrote sighs. “We’re the least-nerdy about ‘This person produced this, this person wrote that.’ We vibe with whatever we vibe with, and we don’t know anything about names.”

But Hinds’ manager convinced them that the big hotshot writer was important enough that, on the band’s off day, they needed to get together with them and work. The session kept getting pushed back, though, and Cosials and Perrote were starting to feel like rubbish as the afternoon shrunk. “In Spain, we work until very late,” Perrote says. “But we know that, in America, sessions tend to finish at 5 or 6 PM, which is fair. We were like, ‘Oh, fuck, the day is already gone.’” But someone called somebody and there was a guy with a studio in his house who could do a session that day. It took Cosials and Perrote two minutes to hop in a car and get to Silverman’s place, and they wound up writing “Boom Boom Back” in four hours after he showed them “a very important pedal.” “No one ever told him it was Hinds,” Cosials laughs. “We were ‘the Spanish girls’ and that was it. He never knew who we were before we arrived at his door.”

On that trip to Los Angeles, Hinds met Beck, but Cosials claims that it’s the “least-sophisticated story you can imagine. “We met two days ago and, suddenly, he invited us to another thing, so we are together again, because we are getting along and we’re liking each other,” she says. “We just wrote fucking ‘Boom Boom Back,’ so we’re pumped and we’re hyped and we’re playing it to everyone. When you have done something cool at school, you show it to your friends, right? ‘Beck, please, you gotta listen to this. Look what we just wrote.’ And he said, ‘Fuck, I love it!’ Then, it started as a joke, ‘Why don’t you sing on it? Come on!’” “Literally just being cheeky,” Perrote adds. “‘Oh, he might as well say no, but what if he says yes?’ Suddenly, he said yes. We definitely weren’t afraid of rejection, too. It wasn’t a big ask, like ‘Would you please marry me?’ We didn’t break a sweat, we didn’t triple-think it.” “I still can’t believe it sometimes,” Cosials remarks. “Me neither,” Perrote replies.

Another familiar face on VIVA HINDS is Grian Chatten of Fontaines D.C., who’s been a friend of Hinds for almost a decade now and sings on “Stranger.” “There was a tiny moment that no one remembers, but our band was bigger than his,” Cosials says, grinning ear-to-ear. It’s true, though. Back in 2016, Fontaines D.C. opened for Hinds in Dublin and had to audition with the promoter to get that gig. “It wasn’t a big show, maybe a 300 or 400-cap,” Perrote adds. “But the promoter, because they were so new and it was one of their first shows in Dublin, had them open for another show. They were like, ‘Okay, you’re good enough to open for Hinds,’ which is just so ridiculous! They opened for us, and we were mind-blown. We fully believed in them, and I even remember the clothes they were wearing. When you start and someone supports you, you never fucking forget that. Every time they have an interview in Spain, they mention us. It’s so beautiful that they remember and that they still appreciate it.” Cosials even recalls spending an evening in London with Chatten and his Fontaines bandmate Conor Curley, which she dubs “confessions night.” “Both were saying that they used to live together back in the day and, apparently, they had our first record and they were obsessed with it.”

After she and Perrote wrote “Stranger,” Cosials was struggling with how her vocals sounded. “I told Ana, because I love her part and I think her part is gorgeous, that maybe we could bring someone else in to sing my part,” she says. It was after that night in London with Chatten that Cosials felt comfortable enough to text him with the favor. “I was like, ‘Hey, do you want to sing on a Hinds song?’ And he replied, ‘My phone is dying, so yes,’” she snickers. “He did a fucking great job, he wrote his stuff. He’s a genius, but he made us wait. He didn’t deliver the fucking file until the very last day of studio.” “Stranger” doesn’t have a traditional structure, arriving without a typical chorus and, instead, resting on the laurels of a verse-instrumental relationship. “We wanted to keep it open, because we didn’t know what Grian was going to send,” Perrote adds. “It’s not a copy/paste where you can fit it. We didn’t know the length of his verse, we had no idea. We gave him total freedom, so we had to record everything after he sent his part.” Because Chatten wrote the lines “I was cold and strong, melted for a song / Night was made of glitter, I’m happy to go on,” I think he’s earned a pass for his lateness.

VIVA HINDS finds Cosials and Perrote singing in their native Spanish language for the first time on a record, on the tracks “En Forma” and “Mala Vista.” Over the years, they’ve slowly been flirting with adding more Castillian words into their lyrics. “It’s like a test, because the timber of your vocal sounds really different [when you sing in a different language],” Cosials says. “We didn’t have a developed-enough taste in music sung in Castilian, so we had to develop that taste before we could do a whole song in Spanish—because, back in the day, we only listened to music that was sung in English. Sometimes, people struggle to do songs that they like and they listen to and, to us, it’s very easy when we do it in English.” In their Leave Me Alone and I Don’t Run eras, Hinds would have been far more lost had they made this leap, and they didn’t have the musical vocabulary to know whether or not it sounds cheesy.

Perrote points to her and Cosials being a duo of writers who put so much focus onto lyric-writing that they become boring after sitting with one word or one sentence for hours and hours. “We want to make sure that we love the lyrics,” she asserts. “With Spanish, it was the same, or even more, because it’s our native language and we know more of the language. We’ve been writing songs for over eight years in English, but the level of expertise wasn’t there with Spanish. We flirted with it on other albums, but we knew it had to be amazing.” She pauses, before echoing Cosials’ idea: “After all of these years, after listening to more songs in Spanish and after feeling more sure about ourselves and what we like and what we don’t, it worked.”

While other genres like J-pop and K-pop are seeing some instances of artists meshing their native language with English, Hinds consider themselves the “weirdos” of Madrid’s music scene because they don’t predominantly sing in Spanish. “Every interview that we have in Spain, that is a thing,” Perrote explains. “Obviously, you don’t want to sound like you think English is better than Spanish, because it’s not. It’s just the way we’ve done it and, now that we’ve built an international career, we don’t want to miss out on communicating with people from all over the world.”

It was frustrating for Hinds early on, leaning into the English side of their musicality, because they didn’t have all of the phrases and mannerisms to best express themselves as people. Some of their jokes didn’t land with English-speaking interviewers, and their personalities weren’t able to fully flourish. But, eventually, Cosials and Perrote caught up and can look backwards at those annoyances with gratitude and hindsight. “As you know less words than in Spanish, two things can happen,” Cosials says. “It can end up being very beautiful, because we had to take a fucking longer way to communicate, but that could be very poetic. But, also, whenever you’re not feeling 100%, it takes too much time [to answer] and you feel like, ‘Oh, shit, I’m saying the same fucking word again.’ That used to frustrate us a lot.”

“En Forma” is a particularly beautiful breakthrough for Hinds, as Cosials wrote it while enduring a breakup and turning 30. The groove of it would never suggest that kind of transformative, consequential period, but Perrote wanted to reckon with “the chaos and huge spectrum of what it’s like to be a young woman these days” and conjure just how “overwhelming it can be to juggle the news, politics, our bodies, relationships and laundry.” The Hinds sound expands, too, as synthesizers fill up the space that a skyscraping riff would have eight years ago. “En Forma” is the only song on VIVA HINDS that didn’t begin with Cosials and Perrote in the same room together, and when they sing “mírame no puedo más” in unison, you can hear the devastating clattering in their vocals as if they came colliding back into each other. Then, as Cosials laments “yo no sabía que el dolor, me ocuparía tanto tiempo,” in comes a thrush of an all-consuming, far-too-familiar sense of grief.

“It was one of those things that, when she showed the demo to me, it was super Carlotta,” Perrote says. “I think it would be impossible for that verse to be written by absolutely anyone else. When we hear it or read the part, you can just picture her in her kitchen, doing the kettle. It’s a very Cici thing. There was something really powerful about hearing her talk about something as specific as water boiling, or her picturing her training shoes and the whole mini world that is her house and her room and her chaos. But it was something super translatable and super universal—thinking about wanting to be better but not being able to, and then thinking about love and something huge and romantic, but then being like, ‘Oh, fuck, I still need to do the dishes!’ It was super easy, at least for me, to connect with that, with that chaotic thing. It was too much to sing in English. It’s too Spanish to be sung in English.”

If there was ever a moment on this record that underscores just exactly who Hinds have become, it’s “The Bed, The Room, The Rain and You,” Cosials and Perrote’s swing at Alvvays-style dream pop gem that lands right on the chin. Together, they bask in the glow of love’s simplest magic, singing about “a road that drives me home, let me know where I can find you.” It’s impossible to listen to “The Bed, The Room, The Rain and You” without considering the friendship that’s lit from within it, even if it’s canonically a love song. You can hear the love Cosials and Perrote have for each other glow beneath every note. In Spanish, they sing about the sea, the cherries, the sun and the moon; in English, they sing about a magnetism that pulls two souls together. The song itself is beautiful and brief, but the story it tells spans a forever or two, and it was the first thing Hinds wrote that signaled that, just maybe, their next chapter would come out all right. “When we wrote it, I knew everything would be okay,” Cosials confesses. “We had it so clear, the connection was perfect.”

The grammar of the song exists in the softness it does because, when Cosials and Perrote were holed up in France, a neighbor complained about the noise they were making while tracking VIVA HINDS. To combat that, they started whispering and writing in quiet and, despite turning the volume knob down, everything fell into place. “Every single element felt like it was there waiting for us and we picked them up,” Cosials says. “Some songs, somehow, are waiting for you. You feel like, ‘Oh, shit, we’re missing one.’ When your album gets drawn out, you fill the gaps and you have the sensation of how you have to fill those gaps and what kind of song has to fill those gaps. [‘The Bed, The Room, The Rain and You’] completely showed us a world that we didn’t know we could go to. Those cowboy guitars that we have behind, and the way of using the reverb, that is something we’ve always used in a completely different way. And our vocals, even singing so nicely and sweet, that is a register we don’t usually go. And it wasn’t an effort to us. It was supernatural, and we were loving it.”

At its core, VIVA HINDS is a record that contends with, as Cosials puts it, getting older and “trying to realize that happiness and sadness start becoming difficult to distinguish.” “The Bed, The Room, The Rain and You” is a prime example of those blurred margins. “I cannot tell if it’s a happy song or a sad song,” Cosials continues. “I don’t know if we’re happy or not, and I think that’s fucking good enough. That’s life, it’s complicated. I think it’s a song that will tell you whatever you want to hear.” Perrote then pulls out an internet reference as old as Hinds: “It’s like that viral dress, you don’t know if it’s gold and white or blue and black. [‘The Bed, The Room, The Rain and You’] depends on the listener.”

VIVA HINDS is a friendship album, and Hinds is a friendship band. At the center of these lyrics, from those introductory affirmations of “You O.K.?” and “I’ve been better, to be honest” to the closing remarks of “let’s just hold on together now,” is a marvel to behold, as two soulmates spend 40 minutes never parting ways with each other. “Really connecting with someone, I don’t find it that easy. Maybe I’m too exquisite or something,” Cosials laughs. “But I don’t find it that easy, and I think it’s absolutely necessary for dealing with existence in this world. Imagine that your best friend is the person you work with. You know how happy I wake up when I know that Ana is gonna come to my side? We went to a public swimming pool to work this morning. We still are in this together, and we built it together. That’s the most amazing thing that I can think of.”

Perrote echoes Cosials’s affections: “I think our friendship is the most beautiful and important thing. I think friendship, in general, is a treasure. It saves lives. I’m a firm believer that friendship is probably the most important bond that you should try to find or care for. Especially being a girl band, I don’t think there’s a lot of role models of friendship. If you find your soulmate, it has to be of romantic love. When girls come after a show and we meet them and they tell us that they started a band with their best friends, I cannot believe it. The fact that you can connect and make art together and inspire other girls to do the same, it’s so powerful—and it’s a lot more powerful than what you can do on your own. Nowadays, everything is individualistic and competitive and who’s better, who’s prettier, who’s funnier. Being able to relax and be like, ‘Of course, she’s funnier!’ or ‘Of course, she’s shining more right now! Tomorrow, I’ll shine,’ it’s amazing to share that and not live all of those things alone.”

Even at Hinds’ lowest points, Cosials and Perrote have stuck together in every inch of their shared world—cry-laughing in each other’s faces and weaponizing sarcasm to the extreme when there was nothing else to laugh at. Name changes, lineup shifts and pandemics be damned, VIVA HINDS is a goofy, gossipy, kiss-off pastoral set aglow by two people who love each other so much that you can feel the warmth pouring out of your phone speaker. It’s the kind of music that you’d sweat through a hot March afternoon just to hear for the first time, the kind of music that aches with a tempest of honesty, hope, humor and heart. So, to that tune, take a deep breath, exhale and repeat after me: Long live friendship. Long live the Spanish superstars. Long live Hinds. Viva Carlotta Cosials. Viva Ana Perrote.

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Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.